A few months ago, I picked up a copy of The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World at a little bookshop in Half Moon Bay. My attraction to this book probably had something to do with witnessing all that death by poop-related illness in the Oregon Trail game as a kid (what exactly is the difference between cholera and dysentery?). There was something striking about this book other than its many references to “rice water stools” — it articulated some of my previously vague thoughts about how the internet is transforming urban life.
Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that one of the paradoxical effects of metropolitan life is that huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. [...]
The irony, of course, is that digital networks were supposed to make cities less attractive, not more. The power of telecommuting and instant connectivity was going to make the idea of densely-packed urban cores as obsolete as walled castle-cities of the Middle Ages. Why would people crowd themselves into harsh, overpopulated environments when they could just as easily work from their homestead on the range? But as it turns out, many people actually like the density of urban environments, precisely because they offer the diversity of [Jane Jacobs'] Viennese bakeries and art movies. As technology increases our ability to find these niche interests, that kind of density is only going to become increasingly attractive. These amateur maps offer a kind of antidote to the scale and complexity and intimidation of the big city. [...]
The great promise of urban density is that it thrusts so many diverse forms of intelligence, amateur and professional, into such a small space.
Filed under: Big Picture, Technology
